In the current issue, Robert B. Ray explains movie stardom as a perplexity in Hollywood’s attempt to mechanize its productions according to “Taylorist-Fordist models of rationalized production”:

When Garbo was contemplating a comeback, cameraman James Wong Howe was hired to do a screen test. When the actress arrived for the session, he was disappointed by how ordinary she looked, and surprised that she had brought with her neither make-up man nor hairdresser. “I had never photographed her,” Howe recalled, “I was frightened. This great lady!” What followed amounts to the crucial lesson:

When the camera started to turn…she listened to the grinding sound and her face changed, her expression, her whole emotional mood came to life and transformed her completely. It was incredible, wonderful…. She was like a horse on a track: nothing, and then the bell goes, and something happens. When the shot was over, she said simply, “Have you got enough?” And I said “Yes,” and very matter-of-factly she remarked, “Okay, I go home.” She did. And she was nothing again. (Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen, 92.)

Precisely because movie-star performance does not involve Taylor’s notion of skill, it cannot be standardized, and its “workers” cannot be easily replaced. Movie stardom amounts to a highly unusual task, unimagined by Taylor and unlike almost any other job in the world.

In the current issue, Amy Benson responds to artworks with a series of linked meditations. “The City” is guided by Andy Goldsworthy:

We came from suburbs with churches the size of malls. Suburbs where they fix Brazilian cocktails and cleaning-fluid drugs. We came from suburbs where the houses are squat bunkers and the trees cool and tall. And from suburbs where the doors and walls are hollow.

In the Current Issue, Charles Holdefer considers a lesser-known side of George Orwell:

Intriguingly, in this time of crisis, Orwell chose to linger over “Boys’ Weeklies” and to offer spirited defenses of Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Henry Miller—strange bedfellows indeed. While stating that “almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships,” he nonetheless found it important to put Billy Bunter and W.H. Auden into context. Orwell’s 1939 writings continue to demand our attention, not just because of the obvious historical resonance of this pivotal year, but also because the views that he expresses remind us of something other than the turbulence of the times. These writings show Orwell, the political animal, grappling with literary sensibilities that date back to his childhood and precede his political awareness. And yet throughout his reflections he is persistently disturbed by the seeming superfluity of the writer in dire times, a problem that would occupy his political conscience for the rest of his life.

Read more about Charles Holdefer in the magazine’s Contributors’ Notes.